Modem Europe Spring-Summer 2019

Cover by Mrzyk & Moriceau

For this edition, Modem is giving “carte blanche” to Petra Mrzyk, born in 1973 in Nuremberg and Jean-François Moriceau, born in 1974 in Saint-Nazaire. They live and work in France.

After their meeting at the Quimper School of Fine Arts in the late 1990s, 'Petra Mrzyk and Jean François Moriceau began to work together, basing their practice on drawing. Since then, they “practice” the creation like a sport: in duet and at a high level.

« A drawing a day keeps the doctor away ! »

Culturists of the imagination, first inspired by artists like the surrealist Picabia and the Swiss duo Fischli & Weiss, the two designers elevated popular imagery to the rank of art by the scholarly use of the China’s ink.

For 20 years, the couple in the life as in the work knit a sensual and tactile world where exceptional fantasies are an obsession. Their mostly black ink drawings are inspired by many sources of contemporary visual culture.

Their works are to be found in numerous public and private collections in France and the United States, among them France’s FNAC (National Fund of Contemporary Art), the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, MoMA in New York and LACMA in Los Angeles.